CRT’s communications
Dustin over at Rain City Guide has posted 8 common mistakes made my real estate bloggers, some of which he admits they learned from experience. I think here at CRT we’re sometimes guilty of #7: Expecting people to comment just because you asked a question.
Its a good read for anyone and I think mistakes 5 through 8 apply to any blog, not just ones in real estate.
As we have mentioned before CRT will have a dedicated room will be available to real estate bloggers during national meetings. We’ve gotten further in our planning, and we thought we’d let you know where we’re going and get some feedback.
In or around the room we’ll have the following
Now, we need your help! What do you think of what we’ve got in mind? Is there anything else you’d suggest?
We’d like to have some idea of who will be coming to the show and utilizing the room. We don’t need anything formal and its certainly not binding. We just want to make sure we have enough of the things listed above secured for use. Especially the coffee, but that’s my personal bias/addiction showing. Also, we’d like to have an idea just so we can keep an eye out and say "Hi." You can let us know you’re coming by leaving a comment here or by mailing info@crt.realtors.org.
Also, please spread the word to all the real-estate bloggers out there. If they don’t know about the room, they won’t be able to take advantage of it!
Much has been written about the beta launch of Zillow recently. Mark’s recent post described a parallel to other industries, the resources that Zillow brings to the table and how they engage the consumer.
Well my comments are meant to amplify that. Zillows business model that supplies online home valuations has been cited as being inaccurate. My simple tests on properties that I am familiar with, seemed to be out of line with reality. I too, question the Zillow home valuations at this point.
And that is my point - its at this point. Look for the model to be improved and additional services offered.
Zillow was launched in beta form - that means it is still under going development ands testing. Many of the management team at Zillow came from other firms that made their mark by using the web to engage the consumer and in particular at Expedia, the online travel service. Something Zillow’s CEO Rich Barton said at the recent Inman Connect Real Estate conference in NYC keeps coming back to me. Batrton explained how for years consumers came to Expedia site to comparison shop, but did not purchase their airline tickets or hotel rooms online.
To me that says how Zillow might be viewing the market and their entry in it. Maybe they’re not looking to be an instant success, but given their funding and experience Zillow should be considered here for the long term. Of course they’ll need to perfect their model and solidify the valuations - but over the long term they could have something that consumers searching for information and remaining anonymous might embrace.
I would like to address the use of the term “trust” in our industry. It is being used in multiple contexts and is bound to cause confusion. I saw this a same phenomenon play out a couple of years ago around the word “transaction”. In that case, “camps” developed around each context and discussions totally became bogged down. I just want to get ahead of this one.
The most popular context for the word trust is in conjunction with discussion around Digital Rights Management (DRM) or Trust Models. REALTORS® control the rights that others have to their data. Trust is used to describe the relationship between the data owner and the data user. The owner trusts the user and grants them rights to use the data. I have posted thoughts on DRM already, so I won’t bore you.
PolicyPage is a new application from the Center for REALTOR® Technology. It is an MLS display policy compliance tool. PolicyPage is licensed under an open-source license.
PolicyPage reads MLS member websites and compares them to MLS rules (defined in PolicyPage.) It notifies the MLS and optionally the member when tests are failed. PolicyPage’s initial focus will be to deliver rules that allow checking NAR’s IDX model display rules.
The 0.9.8 enhancements include:
We continue to look to the MLS community to guide future development priorities. We invite and welcome your input.
Based of feedback received this is likely to be the final beta release of PolicyPage. We look to general release the app in the next few weeks.
PolicyPage comments (and bugs) can be posted to the project mail list.
You can download PolicyPage application by visiting the project site.
Normally, I leave the non-technical thinking pieces to Mark and Todd. I think it’s finally time for me to give it a go. I was recently reading an article that Spencer Critchley posted on the O’Reilly Network: How Digital Production & Distribution Are Making Things Worse For Musicians, Not Better. At one point Critchley sites Jeremy Siegel’s book The Future For Investors and Siegel’s use of the fallacy of composition. To quote Critchely quoting Siegel:
Any individual or firm through its own effort can rise above the average, but every individual and firm, by definition, cannot. Similarly… if all firms have access to the same technology and implement it, then costs and prices will fall and the gains of productivity will go to the consumer. (p. 105, 1st ed.)
I find that this quote really resonates with the real estate industry and its presence on the net. We hear a lot of talk about new web sites or new services that have cost millions of dollars to develop. However, in general, anything on the net can be easily recreated by someone else. (For the sake of discussion, we’ll ignore patents and their effect here.) The hard work of coming up with the initial idea is done, but was costly. However, once done, it’s easy for someone else to copy it, destroying the advantage that innovation creates.
In real estate, a clear example that brokers and agents can relate to is having listings on your web site. When IDX first came around, having a listing site was somewhat novel and gave a competitive advantage. However, these days, with software such as Open-Realty utilizing standards like RETS, anyone can have an up-to-date listing site. Everyone can have that advantage and as a result, no one has a unique advantage. We can see this pattern repeated in real estate, other examples are the adoption of cell phones and the almost universal use of e-mail.
For an example outside real estate, let’s take a look at Netflix. Recently, the blog Netflix Fan had a post titled “It’s like Netflix, only from Blockbuster.” In this post, the Netflix Fan talks about the initial challenges Netflix had in explaining how their DVD by mail system worked. Netflix spent a lot of money developing the business model followed by advertising and educating the consuming public about it. However, as Blockbuster Online, GreenCine, and others have come on the scene, they’ve been able to replicate the basic model without having to do all the explanatory advertising.
What’s the lesson to learn from all this? One important one I’ve taken away is that technology will give you an advantage only as long as you are exclusive on that technology. Your exclusive advantage can be very short-lived. It also shows us what we’ve known all the time, we need to differentiate ourselves by offering additional services that can’t be easily replicated by a computer, and by how we interact with the consumer.
Let’s think outside of the box for a moment. To do this, let’s invent a new company in the Real Estate space and have some fun! We must eliminate old ideas like aggregation and CRM and really get creative.
Finding a parallel to our industry is a good place to start so let’s choose …. travel. At one time, there were plenty of Travel Agents. They were replaced by on-line services that allowed consumers to do their own planning. Ah, a paradigm for our case study.
Next, we need to decide what service REALTORS® provide that would be attractive to offer to consumers with an on-line model. Showing listings? No, this has been done. Offering referral services? With the legal ramifications we would use hefty sums of money that we just raised from investors to defend ourselves. Bad idea. How about property valuation? Hey we may be on to something.
OK, we need to have access to Public Records as a start. Not available everywhere, but in enough places to interest investors. Wait a minute …. each house is unique, this model needs some tweaking. Boy, Listing Agents sure have some pretty nifty CMA models. I bet we could hire some of those people and put it together with Public Records data. The model is beginning to take shape.
What is missing though? Perhaps we allow consumers to look at properties (even if they are not for sale) and run them through some custom CMA models. To make the offering really captivating, we allow the consumer to “play games” with improvements to the property and watch the impact on the potential market price. Man this is so close to Marshall McCluhan’s “the user is the context” it is almost scary.
I can see it now, consumers flocking to our site to play Real Estate valuation “games”. To finance this, well, I guess we could fall back to advertising revenue. Wait a minute, maybe after a while, the consumer might want to get serious. Maybe we should add some “for pay” services to round out the site? Hmmm.
Now for technical resources. Well we started thinking about the travel industry so let’s get some of those technical people. They did it before. Gee, I hope they will get along with the Real Estate people.
Boy, all of this dreaming is interesting. Oh never mind, it will never work.
Maps of listings are a great way to enhance a listing website. Many of you already know this, but both Google and Yahoo use Asynchronous Javascript And XML (AJAX) to do their magic.
Last week, a major AJAX announcement was made from IBM. Basically, it should ensure that tools will be available from a wide variety of vendors. I always feel better when I have choices, whether they be in code or life!
As a review, AJAX allows a web-based application to “appear” to be a desktop application. The key word here is appear. Although there is still communication between the browser and the server, the user doesn’t see the “flashing” of the page. The communication actually by-passes the traditional (and time consuming HTTP sessions) of web-based applications.
This technology (or more accurately “programming style”)has actually been around awhile, but is getting some extra attention these days due to mapping APIs and e-mail clients that are beginning to appear. AJAX will (hopefully) begin to standardize practices in these type of applications.
Ten points to anyone who posts the connection between AJAX and the stadium in the picture!
Rudolph Clausius died in 1888 and his contributions to science included elements of the the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This natural law states (heavy paraphrase) that without constraints all things move towards disarray. If you consider this law in the context of modern day software and computers you might question how it applies. I contend that the Second Law of Thermodynamics can be applied to the adoption of software and technical practices in business.
When Clausius talked about disarray, he used the more technical and appropriate term entropy to describe the transformation of energy. An example is the movement of energy away from cold objects (like ice melting) in a warm room.
To make my point about the law in modern business, I will use disarray to mean distribution, the process of moving away from the source (developer) to the consumers (end user).
I will also use constraints to mean all forms of licenses, contracts, patents and other elements that are intended to either 1) control distribution or 2) ensure that developers can derive just compensation.
Without constraints, modern day software, tools and practices would naturally flow from developers to end users. It would be just like art, enriching our lives and contributing to the development of mankind. Developers would be helping others as they came up with new ways to make tasks easier to perform.
Business people label this scenario as naive because they sense there is lost opportunity. All of this “contributing to the common good” stuff has to mean profit. I can’t tell you how many meetings I have attended where the conclusion of the presentation was “… and we will all be millionaires!“. Because we are not living in the movie Wall Street, greed is not good. It is interesting that there are so many willing and able to generate profit for themselves when they did not do the work in the first place. There is nothing wrong with selling software, but the price should reflect the value and utility of the product not just the profit motive. Everyone is entitled to be compensated for their work.
I am not against licensing and patents, but I do look down on greed. Licensing and patents were originally (I believe) intended to control how a person’s property was used. For instance, I as the consumer am not allowed to use your tool to conduct genocide. Somehow, we have altered the meaning to assign worth. Product A is “better” than Product B because it has a patent attached to it.
I believe that the pace of technological adoption in Real Estate is artificially retarded by patents and licensing that are not aligned with the worth of their contribution. I am constantly presented with “get rich quick” schemes thinly veiled as “technology”. People ask my opinion of the product and I tell them the honest truth. Fine, call me a heretic. I am not anti-business, just anti-greed.
